Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
The Chicago Imagists and the Hairy Who certainly seem to be having a moment. It’s rare that one goes to an art fair these days without seeing some fine work from these artist groups, whether it’s that of Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum or Gladys Nilsson. Active in the late 1960s, these talented line-makers blended the finest practices of painting and cartooning to produce works that were both transcendent but with plenty of counter-cultural elements to freak out the squares.
Christina Ramberg (1946-1995) wrote that her own paintings could be “a little bit pornographic, hands feeling, caressing, masturbating the body” and wondered regarding her own work, “how ’bout implications of rape?” In our regressive times, it was provocative for the Art Institute of Chicago to organize the largest survey of her work to date, which has recently come to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The show builds on an earlier retrospective and features nearly 100 works, including paintings, quilts, sketchbooks and archival ephemera pulled from across her too-short two-decade career.
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Ramberg’s work conjures sadomasochism and pin-up girls—her archives in this exhibition show her debts to Allen Jones and Guy Bourdin. But she renders her subjects so big and abstract that you have to think of them mostly as concepts; these are works about being turned on, but they probably shouldn’t turn you on, actually.
Shady Lacy (1971) displays the back of a woman wearing intricate undergarments, but quantitatively, most of the work is taken up by the design of the lace, which bears images of happy little flowers. Close examination offers little for perverts, though they might notice that the woman’s long hair is trapped, charmingly, in her underwear.
Ramberg broke down everything into shapes and, accordingly, a great strength of her technique is the way she renders the textures of fabrics. Delicate Decline (1972) could be quite kinky because it portrays a faceless woman with her arms bound behind her back, but what leaps out at first is the shiny parts of her lingerie because of the way it contrasts with the more designed parts of it, and the woman’s pallid skin, which is blue-grey, cool and dull. The position is sexy but inscrutable. Yes, Ramberg is concerned with hips and breasts, but she seems most interested in executing a curve that is both rough and smooth at the same time.
This is body horror or maybe body alienation, but it’s also a clear path to abstraction. By the 1980s, Ramberg had reached a “crisis” of painting and turned to quilts. “Quiltmaking was the perfect activity for me at that moment because I did not have to think about content,” she wrote.
It allowed her also to explore the interactions of fabrics in the real world. If her paintings of women broke down complicated sexual experiences to their core sensations of shapes and feelings, her quilts did the opposite. Japanese Showcase (1984) looks like any other quilt until you squint closely and see the way she’s matched up the lines so that two pieces of fabric you thought were different are, in fact, exactly the same, just in different colors. Then you look over and see that the next row is a mirror image of these. Reality refracts into itself. Like the best of her cohort, it’s trippy as hell while still managing to be cozy.
“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through June 1, 2025.
